Families

Tax revenue generated by working mothers would far outstrip the cost of free nursery places for all argues the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in its latest report, Making the Case for Universal Childcare.

At just over 60 per cent, the employment rate of women with children in the UK is much lower than in many other OECD countries. It ranks 19th behind countries such as Iceland, Sweden and Denmark, which tend to have affordable, high-quality childcare provision. Many women in the UK, especially those on low to middle incomes, stop work after having children because of the high cost of childcare. In the UK a couple who are both earning average wages spend 27 per cent of their income on childcare while the average for the 34 developed nations of the OECD is 12 per cent.

Encouraging higher levels of female employment would raise living standards in low income families, argues the Resolution Foundation in The Missing Million: The Potential for Female Employment to Raise Living Standards in Low to Middle Income Britain. From 1968 to 2008, women’s employment levels drove more than a quarter of all income growth in families with low to middle incomes. In more recent years it has become even more important, counterbalancing flat wages and falls in male employment. Yet, even while reliance on women going out to work has grown, the absolute pace of growth has faltered. After rising 7.4 percentage points in the 1980s, the UK female participation rate rose just 1.4 percentage points in the 2000s, leaving the UK ranked only 15th in the OECD on female employment.

Government policies on child poverty have shifted too far in their focus on individual families rather than wider problems, according to the first director of the Sure Start programme, Naomi Eisenstadt. Despite her own commitment to championing parenting classes as a key element of Sure Start, Eisenstadt is critical of the Coalition government’s drift towards promoting good parenting as a key theme in reducing child poverty. ‘I would rather put the food on the table. In the absence of any talk about paying the bills, this focus is disrespectful because it assumes that these are the problems poor people have, and does not recognise that the main problem poor people have is not having enough money,’ she is quoted in The Guardian. ‘It is true that conflict between parents is bad for children, so providing more couple relationship support is a good thing.

In Social Mobility and Child Poverty, the PSE: UK research team is highly critical of the Coalition government’s social mobility strategy and, in particular, its claim that the best way to tackle intergenerational mobility is to break the ‘the transmission of disadvantage from one generation to the next’. The PSE paper dismisses the idea that poverty is ‘transmitted’ between generations as ‘simply incorrect’ and argues that the best way to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and low social mobility is to eradicate poverty among children and adults.

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has launched the Coalition government’s social mobility strategy Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers. The strategy focuses on inter-generational social mobility with the aim of ensuring that everyone has a fair chance of getting a better job than their parents.

The approach moves away from financial measures to support disadvantaged families to family intervention and an aspiration to extend pre-school provision to disadvantaged two-year-olds.

The report outlines five broad principles that underpin the government’s approach:

Pages

PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.